This thesis investigated certain dimensions of inequality in Greece that have not or have only partially been explored so far, utilising the micro-data of a survey carried out in 1988 by the National Centre for Social Research. Reviewed were relevant studies conducted in the past, and evaluated were the available statistical data and information. Certain theoretical and methodological issues that one encounters when analysing and measuring inequality were also discussed. Initially, an analysis by income source was employed, which provided valuable information on the structure and profile of income inequality in Greece. The decomposition analysis by income components showed that entrepreneurial income is the most significant contributor to overall inequality in Greece, despite the fact that it represents a relatively small fraction of household income. Income taxes and social security contribution appeared to have a very weak distributional impact on overall inequality. This impact was explored further by employing regression analysis. It was found that the share of income tax and contributions is mainly related to wages and salaries. The most effective way to maximise their distributional impact is by eliminating tax evasion among the recipients of entrepreneurial income. The average household income was found to be greatly affected by certain population characteristics, and inequality appeared to vary substantially between population subgroups. The decomposition analysis showed that in all the population groups used, inequality between groups accounted for only a very small segment of the overall inequality. Finally, the hypothesis that, in Greece, the family background is a significant factor in determining the offspring's socio-economic status was tested. A loglinear analysis was used in order to uncover all the potentially complex relationship among the variables employed. These results suggested that people face unequal opportunities for education and unequal probabilities of falling below the poverty line due to their family background.

This thesis consists of four separate chapters which address different aspects of inequality and income determination. The first three chapters are country-level studies which examine (1) how incomes are shaped by spatial price differences, (2) the factor income composition, and (3) enterprise size. The final chapter analyses how income inequality changed at the global level. The first chapter investigates the implications of regional price differences for earnings differentials and inequality in Germany. I combine a district-level price index with administrative earnings data from social security records. Prices have a strong equalising effect on district average wages in West Germany, but a weaker effect in East Germany and at the national level. The change in overall inequality as a result of regional price differences is small (although significant in many cases), because inequality is mostly explained by differences within rather than between districts. The second chapter is motivated by the rapid increase in top income shares in the United States since the 1980s. Using data derived from tax filings, I show that this pattern is very similar after controlling for changes in tax unit size. Over the same period as top income shares increased, the composition of these incomes changed dramatically, with the labour share rising. Using a non-parametric copula framework, I show that incomes from labour and capital have become more closely associated at the top. This association is asymmetric such that top wage earners are more likely to also receive high capital incomes, compared with top capital income recipients receiving high wages. In the third chapter, I investigate the positive cross-sectional relationship between enterprise size and earnings using panel data from Ghana. I find evidence for a significant firm size effect in matched firm-worker data and a labour force panel, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. The size effect in self-employment is stronger in the cross-section, but it is driven by individual time-invariant characteristics. The final chapter studies the global interpersonal income distribution using a newly constructed and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. The chapter finds that the global Gini remains high and approximately unchanged at around 0.7. However, this hides a substantial change in the global distribution from a twin-peaked distribution in 1988 into a single-peaked one now. Furthermore, the regional composition of the global distribution changed, as China graduated from the bottom ranks. As a result of the growth in Asia, the poorest quantiles of the global distribution are now largely from Sub-Saharan Africa. By exploiting the panel dimension of the dataset, the analysis shows which decile-groups within countries have benefitted most over this 20-year period. In addition, the chapter presents a preliminary assessment of how estimates of global inequality are affected by the likely underreporting of top incomes in surveys.

Cette thèse étudie les effets des régimes politiques et de l'inégalité socioéconomique sur les institutions économiques et la croissance. Le chapitre 1 considère une version du modèle d'échelles de qualité avec des agents hétérogènes dans le niveau de richesse, de revenu et de savoir-faire. Les instruments de politique économique incluent des barrières à l'entrée sur les marchés des biens et le niveau de la redistribution. Trois types d'équilibres politiques sont considérés. Le chapitre 2 analyse l'effet de la démocratisation sur l'émergence des barrières à l'entrée et la redistribution des revenus. On montre qu'une distribution plus égale du pouvoir politique parmi les individus diminue les barrières à l'entrée seulement si les savoir-faire sont à un niveau élevé et si l'inégalité des savoir-faire et des revenus est faible. Le cas contraire, où les plus riches et les plus pauvres constituent une majorité, conduit à une redistribution élevée, mais aussi à la présence des barrières à l'entrée. Ce chapitre peut expliquer les trajectoires différentes de pays en cours de démocratisation. Le chapitre 3 considère un modèle de croissance endogène, qui décrit la transition de la stagnation pré-industrielle à une croissance stable. Selon le modèle, la qualité des institutions économiques est déterminée par le conflit entre les deux composantes de l'élite (propriétaires fonciers et capitalistes). Le modèle explique les sources politiques de la stagnation et de la croissance, ainsi que la relation entre le conflit social et le développement pendant la période de transition. / This thesis studies the effect of political regimes and economic inequality on the level of barriers to entry, redistribution, and economic growth. Barriers to entry are economic institutions, which protect incumbent firms from competition with new entrants. This is one of the form of economic institutions, which provide gains for a narrow group of agents at the cost of economic efficiency. In Chapter 1 I consider the problem of finding sufficient conditions for political support of liberal, growth-enhancing policy in a quality-ladders model with heterogeneous agents differing in their endowment of wealth and skills. The policy set is two-dimensional: agents vote for the level of redistribution as well as for the level of entry barriers preventing the creation of more efficient firms. I show that under the majority voting rule there are three possible stable political outcomes: full redistribution, low redistribution and free entry (liberal order), high redistribution and high barriers to entry (corporatism). Key variables that determine political outcome include an expected gain from technological adoption, the ratio of total profits to total wages, and the skewness of skills distribution.Chapter 2 extends the analysis of the previous chapter by considering the effect of democrati-zation on barriers to entry and economic outcomes. Democratization shifts the political power from the narrow class of wealthy elites to a broader group of agents. Even if political institutions change towards democratization, under certain conditions this leads only to the rise of redistribution, rather than to the elimination of barriers to entry. This argument is particularly relevant for countries with low human capital level and high inequality in incomes and skills.Chapter 3 considers the two-side relationship between the level of industrialization and the quality of economic institutions, which stimulate the technological adoption and growth. It provides a simple two-sector endogenous growth model of transition from pre-industrial stagnation to modern economic growth regime. The model underlines the role of political conflict between new elite (capitalists) and old elite (landowners) during the whole period of transition. The level of efforts in the political conflict is chosen endogenously by both groups. The model generates a long period of stagnation with a low-intensified conflict between capitalists and landowners, which is followed by industrial revolution with high conflict intensity and higher probability of institutional changes. The model describes political origins of stagnation and growth and interconnections between the political conflict and economic structure.